Vaishlaj 5776‏ - English

By Rabbi Guido Cohen

Asociación Israelita Montefiore Bogotá, Colombia.

At the beginning of this week’s Parashah, Jacob sends a message to his brother Esau saying: "im Laban garti" // "I stayed with Laban and remained until now."

Rashi, in a beautiful interpretation, claims that “I resided” refers to the fact that he has not managed to settle down, that he has not been extolled in the land of Laban as a powerful man, but that he was perhaps just a foreigner.  According to Rashi, Jacob says this to appease Esau and to prove to him that Isaac’s blessing that would have made him more powerful than Esau, has not come to pass.  

Rashi continues to say that the “I resided” (in Hebrew ‘garti’) has a numerical value of 613 clearly implying that Jacob fulfilled the 613 mitzvot in the house of Laban.  This second explanation is interesting.  It is not the only time that our sages emphasize our ancestors’ ability to preserve the mitzvot ‘abroad’, meaning in a land they do not consider their own, a land the consider hostile.  

When the people of Israel are in Egypt, before they are liberated, the Midrash also highlights how they kept certain customs (such as using Hebrew names for children or circumcision), despite them being in a foreign land.  

In a way, what lies beneath this interpretation is how it is more valuable to fulfill the precepts in a foreign land than in our own land, the land of Canaan, because in other lands we are foreigners and that conspires against the continuity of our Judaism.  This idea that there are places where we are ‘local’ and others where we are ‘foreigners’, and that those are less favorable for the observance of the mitzvoth, has accompanied the people of Israel for millennia.  Without going too far, 150 years ago, when many Jews from Eastern Europe emigrated to North America, their parents and rabbis in Russia or Poland were scared because the United States were a ‘treife medinah’, impure land.   

The anti-Semites who saw in the Jew a foreigner, someone different who did not ‘own’ the place in the same measure as others that arrived perhaps a few decades earlier, reinforced this same perspective.

Maybe because of this, Jewish involvement in civic affairs in the countries that took them in was delayed, and in certain places, is still incipient. There was a sort of dilemma between belonging to the place you lived and preserving the Judaism that defined us as ‘in transit’.

However, in many countries we live in we have been helping with our work and ideas to the development of great nations for over a century.  We do not feel like foreigners passing by, but as full active citizens in the countries we live in.

And our Jewish commitment does not depend on being close to or far from a determined land, because the Jew is ‘at home’ as long as he can find a text to study, a table set to celebrate and a community to belong to.  

At times when we prepare to remember and exalt once more the Maccabean heroism, we must also reflect about whether certain categories and dilemmas from the past are relevant today or if they have been overcome.  The feat of the Maccabees was presented out in similar terms to what we analyzed above.  We were Greeks or we were Jews, either we let western culture penetrate us and assimilate us or we preserved our own.  It took the Jewish people almost two millennia to understand that it is possible to be both, that they are not exclusive.

Not until recent modern times did we learn we could ‘feel at home’, love the literature, appreciate the music and enjoy the foods of the lands we feel as our own, without fear of that becoming a threat to our Judaism.  If Jacob lived in modern times, luckily he would not have to choose between belonging to the land of Laban or preserving his identity as a member of this small tribe that would later become the People of Israel.      

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Guido Cohen